I am a very accomplished 35mm Amatuer, I have a number of bodies and lenses. Recently however, I have fallen into bad habits and took only a good APS camera with me on my last European vacation. I still shot over 350 pictures in 14 days. I am trying to decide whether or not the Olympus d450Z will satisfy my need for flexability in varying indoor and outdoor photo situations, or if I would need to move up to the more fully featured (read that more manual control) of the c-2000. I would appreciate the opinion of anyone who has had experience with both cameras.

-- Michael Diamond (Carat50@aol.com), November 08, 1999

Answers

I think the oly 2020 is out at the end of the month, for manual control it can't be beat in the under $1000 price range. The quality difference between 450 and 2000 will probably be like APS and 35mm, you don't notice much til you try to print big. (1.3 megapixel vs 2.1) The 450 can't take external flash, if you have much experience with flash photography you know what a difference a good size flash can make. 450 can't control aperture or shutter priority. 2000 has a much faster lens, a remote control, and way more manual control. With your experienced amateur skills I think you'd appreciate these things more than most people. The 2000 does cost twice as much though. If you can spare the cash I'd save up for the 2020 at the end of the month.

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), November 08, 1999.

Sort of in your position. I worked with a P&S for a while when both Sigma lenses for my 35 crapped out simultaneously and my prior generation 35 gear was in need of cleaning adjustment, etc after gathering years of dust from non-use. I put my money into replacing/restoring my 35mm gear. Consider that one of the real conveniences of 35mm is that you can shoot lots of pictures quickly, changing rolls as often as needed. Then you develop, edit, etc. at your convenience. Digital is capacity limited. Do a critical evaluation of the digital resources needed to take 350 pictures in 14 days away from home. Will you need/want to do something similar on other trips? Check how many pictures at your desirable compression (or non-compression) level can be stored before you need more memory "cards", need to do an edit and dispose or dump to another device, etc. Do you want to constantly be considering where you are on a memory card, what state your batteries are in, when will you be able to charge them, how you are going to shlep the laptop along, etc. (Or were you going to make editing/disposal decisions off the LCD finder?) OTOH if you are going to be shooting close to a homebase, then batteries, charging, etc, dumping to a PC is much less of a concern. And then consider if you need a digital photo equivalent of the P&S you already have at a significantly higher price.

-- Craig Gillette (cgillette@thegrid.net), November 12, 1999.

I got a cheap, used, tiny 2 pound laptop. This quickly tilts the "350 pics in 14 days from home" equation in favor of digital. In fact with this setup, the more pictures you take, the better digital looks, since the incremental cost of shots are near 0 for digital this way. I'm doing just that on my travels right now. If you already have a laptop laying around this is a good solution, otherwise a cheap used one might also be good.

Of course the laptop has additional benefits beyond digicam storage. I also use mine to play MP3's on my car stereo. I'm such a geek.

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), November 12, 1999.